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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Even lower-end Android phones can gain a performance boost.
- Enable developer options to access hidden settings.
- You’ll only need to change two settings to gain the improved speed.
My Pixel 9 Pro runs quite well, and it has since I first purchased it. However, I’ve used several phones over the years that struggled to keep up with my fingers, eyes, and brain. That can be very frustrating, especially if your phone is your only way of being online.
When your phone slows down, you might be tempted to head to the Google Play Store and install one of the many available “optimizers” apps. I would strongly encourage you not to do that, because those apps rarely do anything good, and the worst-case scenario is that the optimizer you just installed is loaded with malware.
So, what do you do?
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Fortunately, there are a couple of settings — already available on your phone — that will improve the performance of your device.
These options are built into your Android phone; all you have to do is unlock them.
Unlocking the features
To unlock and use these features, you have to enable the Android Developer Options. Although this might sound a bit daunting, don’t worry, it’s not. Here’s how.
Open the Settings app on your phone and navigate to About Phone. On that page, you’ll find a listing for Build Number. Tap that entry 7 times, and the Build Options will now be available (found in Settings > System).
The build number tells you the version, release family, and code branch.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
Adjust animations
The first setting you’ll want to change is animations. There are actually three options to change: Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animation duration scale. Here’s what those options do:
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- Window animation scale: Controls the speed of pop-up windows, menus, and dialogs opening.
- Transition animation scale: Manages the animation speed when switching between screens or apps.
- Animator duration sale: Affects the duration of internal UI animations, such as fading, button animations, and loading icons.
There are three animation options to change.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
These will all be set to 1x by default. Change each of those to 0.5x or off to gain some extra speed.
Try changing the scale to see which gives you the best performance.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
Reduce background processes
This feature limits the number of active apps to a specific limit to both save battery and boost performance. This feature is best changed on devices with low RAM (4GB or less). If that describes your device, you should definitely do this.
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Again, this is found in Developer Options. You’ll find it under Apps, which is near the bottom. Tap the entry labeled “Background process limit,” which will be set to “Standard limit” by default.
The default works great for phones with plenty of RAM.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
From the pop-up, I suggest you select “At most 4 processes” to gain added speed without hampering your phone’s performance. You wouldn’t want to limit yourself to only 1 process at a time, as that means you cannot multitask on your phone.
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And that’s all there is to it. Once you’ve done these two things, you should get much better performance from your Android device.